Bill Graham

Biography

Concert promoter and artist manager Bill Graham forever changed the way rock and roll is presented. He provided the business and organizational acumen that allowed the anarchic San Francisco scene of the mid-to-late Sixties to flower in venues such as the Fillmore, a dilapidated auditorium that Graham transformed into a tightly run concert hall beginning in late 1966. There, Graham booked such mainstays of the psychedelic era as the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company and Quicksilver Messenger Service. In 1968, Graham moved the Fillmore into another old dance hall (the Carousel Ballroom, rechristened Fillmore ...